Chapter 4: Reading text

This chapter explains how to read text with Narrator and how to get info about text, such as font, text color, and punctuation.

There are several ways to read text using Narrator. The first and simplest way is to use the arrow keys to navigate text if you’re interacting with a document in a word processor, such as Microsoft Word.

You can also use Scan Mode to read text. To turn on Scan Mode, press Caps lock + Spacebar. Then use the up and down arrow keys to read by line and the left and right arrow keys to read by character. To learn more about Scan Mode, see Chapter 3: Using Scan Mode.

When you want more control over what text you read, Narrator provides a series of text reading commands to help navigate and read text in webpages and applications.

To read a complete document or webpage from the beginning, press Caps lock + H.

To read a document from the beginning to the current cursor position, press Caps lock + Right bracket (]).

To read continuously from the current location in a document or webpage, press Caps lock + M.

To move the cursor to the beginning of a document or webpage, press Caps lock + Y.

As a best practice, use these text reading commands and Scan Mode together. For example, turn on Scan Mode and use the up and down arrow keys to read by line and Caps lock + P or Caps lock + Shift + P to read by paragraph. If you want to reread the current line, press Caps lock + Ctrl + O. To reread the current paragraph, press Caps lock + Ctrl + I.

If an app doesn’t support text reading commands, Narrator will say “not on explorable text.” In this case, use Scan Mode to navigate and read text.

Get more detail on text

Narrator provides different levels of detail about the characteristics of text, known as verbosity. To change the level of verbosity, press Caps lock + A until you hear the level that you want.

Verbosity level 0. Hear only text.

Verbosity level 1. Hear basics such as heading levels, and errors in documents such as spelling and grammar. This is the default level.

Annotation information. Annotations such as spelling and grammar suggestions and comments.

Hear punctuation

Narrator gives you control over how much punctuation you hear when reading text. Press Caps lock+ Alt + Plus sign (+) or Caps lock+ Alt + Minus sign (-) until you hear the punctuation mode you want to use: Default, Math, Some, Most, or All.

Default. Hear little to no punctuation. Natural pauses will indicate items such as commas and periods.

Math. Hear most mathematical symbols.

Some. Hear most conversational punctuation, such as commas and periods.

Most. Hear additional symbols, such as parentheses.

All. Hear all punctuation, including all special symbols.

Read text in other languages

When reading text in a different language, Narrator will automatically select the text-to-speech (TTS) voice for that language if it's installed. To learn more about installing additional TTS voices, see Appendix C: TTS voices.

If the TTS voice for a language isn’t installed, Narrator will state the name of the language and read the text using the default TTS voice.